The only post I made on this blog during 2007 was to announce its closure.

In an era where spewing your guts out on the Internet for your own amusement - and, if you’re lucky enough to have any readers, the amusement of others - has never been more popular, that was a bit of a shame. So I’m back, and I’m badder than ever. I can go left and right.

Some things have changed. Things you’re unlikely to care about, but I’m going to tell you about them regardless. The main thing is that I’ve upgraded to the Wordpress blogging system, so I can update using a swanky user-friendly editor rather than some rubbish I cobbled together myself. I can also take advantage of err, trackbacks and pings and other 21st-century blogging innovations that I frankly don’t quite understand.

Another, more important thing has changed, and that’s the Internet itself. Blogs are now commonplace and even - inexplicably, if you ask me, which of course you didn’t - cool. Imagine that! That means more competition, and vitally for charletans like me, more places from which to siphon ideas. Yes!

There’s also a tendency towards longer, better written and more in-depth blog posts, which suits me just fine. We might have to see about the “better written” part, but the days of trying to limit the word count around these parts are officially over. Get your reading eyes ready because you’ll be needing them.

At least, that’s the plan.

If it doesn’t happen, feel free to come round and shoot me in the face.

Remember that episode of The Brittas Empire where Rimmer Mr Brittas arrives at the gates of Heaven, apparently without any good deeds to his name. “You’ve got a list of good intentions,” says Peter, “but they don’t count for anything I’m afraid.”

My list of good intentions will include my ambitious plan to reengineer HuzboWeb for the Web 2.0 generation, complete with properly object-oriented PHP 4 (rather than the “mess” currently employed), AJAX, a tag cloud, and all that fancy stuff. Unfortunately I got to the planning stage and thought “bugger that”, and another abandoned project was chalked up to laziness.

But look! There are improvements! Exciting developments, even, taking the site up to some kind of Web 1.5 level, possibly. Each post now has a category, indicated by the icon in the top-right corner. Click the icon and you’ll see only the stories in that category.

All right, so certain other sites have had this feature all along - some cynical bastards might even suspect that the only reason this site didn’t have it originally was to avoid the appearance of blatantly ripping others off - but hey, I’m excited.

I’ve put about as much thought into this as the government put into their plans for homebuyers’ packs - or their plans for anything really - so don’t be surprised if it breaks. If it does, please leave a comment so I can get it sorted.

Slight changes afoot at huz.org.uk. I’ve removed the Huz FM feature, partly so I can listen to Crazy Frog in privacy, but mostly because people keep arriving here after Googling for some of my misspelt ID3 tags and it’s been getting on my nerves.

I’m getting a bit tired of this site in general. Yes, again. What should I do about it? Concentrate on a specific subject? Just keep rambling here whenever I fancy it, despite the fact that the results are completely incoherent and not worth reading? Or nuke the thing from orbit and mount the smouldering ashes on my mantlepiece?

Answers on a postcard please.

What’s this, huz.org.uk is back after only 18 days of downtime? Good work, 123reg and PlusNet! I hope next time is just as smooth!

And what tipped me off that the site was back up and running? The appearance, in my inbox, of lots of alerts that the PHP form spammers were back. Well, at least someone missed me. :~

Look forward to the resumption of my exciting schedule of never updating soon! I suppose I’d better start the Huz FM feature back up.

Sorry. Someone at Plusnet apparently farted and blew away the disks this site was stored on, or something.

I think the database still exists and the PHP is safe and sound on my Linux computer, but the question is, can I be bothered to re-upload the site? Considering the amount of effort I put into updating it on a regular basis, I reckon no, at least for the moment. Sorry!

If you’re really good, you might get a rejigged site in the distant future. However, this would involve thinking up something interesting and low-maintenance to stick up on it, which is the difficult part.

What do you mean, five months late? I always planned to open at the end of July! Registering the domain way back in, er, March, was all part of the cunning plan!

I would also like to state, just for the record, that the emergence of The Bennyblog and elTee’s site in the same weekend did nothing to sting me into action. I didn’t need stinging. I was already beavering away, being all dynamic, meeting all my project milestones and everything. Again, all part of the cunning plan.

And, while I’m clearing up all these silly little misunderstandings, you see the links at the side there? Totally not stolen from Remi’s site. At all. All my idea. Really.

Anyway: hello. Welcome to my brand spanking new web site. I hope you will enjoy it. Admittedly it doesn’t contain that much ’stuff’ at the moment, but I hope to be adding things on a regular basis. After all, I need something to update with, right? Right?

In the meantime, have a poke around with the pretty themes, chuck the RSS feed URL into your favourite news-reading software (after all, you want to know the second I even think about updating, I’m sure!), and try to break my fancy PHP script by posting reams of song lyrics. Go on. I dare you.

In the meantime, I’m off to play Beyond Good and Evil. Not that I’ve been messing with this damn web-site all weekend, you understand - I’m way too disciplined for that - but I feel I’ve been neglecting it, not giving it the tender loving care it so richly deserves. Toodle-pipski!